AT NOON in Sitio Bato, Barangay Ermita, Cebu City, Anita* (not her real name) fed her nine-month-old toddler a hotdog and two packets of puso (hanging rice) from one of the food vendors lining the street near their home.
The toddler’s lunch cost Anita P21. But for the government, it has cost so much more in terms of the budget needed to educate mothers on the proper food to give their young children, as well as to feed the children themselves to correct the malnutrition resulting from their parents’ mistakes.
Under the Philippine Plan of Action for Nutrition 2017-2022, the Department of Health and local government units (LGUs) provide health systems and community-based support for infant and young child feeding, and supplementary feeding of pregnant women and children 6-23 months old.
Once the children get to day care, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and its partners have the Supplementary Feeding Program, while the Department of Education undertakes the supplementary feeding of malnourished children from kindergarten to Grade 6.
“Behavior change in the mothers is needed,” said Emma Seville, nutrition program coordinator of Cebu City’s Department of Social Welfare Services (DSWS), of the mothers who buy their children cooked food from vendors.
“In Barangay Pasil and other congested areas, there are many food vendors because there are many buyers. The quality of the food is not good for the child. We can’t be sure of its safety and cleanliness,” she said.
So while the DSWS feeding is ongoing, the mothers are oriented on good food choices and taught to prepare them. Basically, this means “going back to vegetables.”
Supplementation
The DSWS-Cebu City conducts a 120-day Food Supplementation Program (FSP) for all children 36 to 59 months old enrolled in the 259 day care centers in the city’s 80 barangays, regardless of their nutritional status.
“We organize the mothers in that area. The DSWS buys the ingredients, supervised by the city nutrition scholar. It’s best that the mothers do the cooking on a rotation basis,” said Seville. But some mothers don’t help.
“The mothers are lazy,” she said. “Sometimes, they don’t even bring their children to the center.”
In day care, there are supposed to be 50 children, but at times, only 40 show up.
“In the urban areas, like Barangays Sambag I and II, usually, it’s because the mothers are busy gambling. In the mountainous areas, it’s because sometimes the day care center is far from their homes,” Seville said.
The DSWS also feeds malnourished children in 70 barangays who don’t go to day care.
But instead of prioritizing barangays with the highest malnutrition prevalence, they choose for feeding “those barangays with a big number of malnourished children, like Guadalupe, which has more than 200.”
The barangays with the highest number of underweight children are Guadalupe, with 227 underweight children; Inayawan, 220; Tisa, 212; Mabolo, 135; Sambag 2, 124; Ermita, 113; Sawang Calero, 102; Carreta, 97; Toong, 94 and Basak Pardo, also 94.
Under the FSP funded by the Department of Social Welfare and Development 7, the DSWS last year fed 13,427 children in day care with a rice allocation of 160,104 kilos and a budget of P17.61 million for the viand.
READ: Pantawid families in the glare of feeding program
Seville said that for the other FSP, which is funded by the Cebu City government, the budget of P12.18 million this year will benefit 3,517 children under five years old, 3,795 school children, and 5,967 children in 3,254 disadvantaged families that have children under 12 years old.
The food given to the disadvantaged families is for the family members below 12 years old. Every 20 days for a 90-day period, each family receives six kilos of rice, 20 eggs and seven noodle sachets to supplement the food in the household, she said.
Guadalupe
In Barangay Guadalupe, Councilor Apol Ross Enriquez, Committee on Health chairperson, said the village’s high number of malnourished is due in part to its being the city’s biggest barangay, as well as to the transients made up of people who had relocated there after their homes in other parts of the city were demolished.
“Some families have 13 children. And at Sitio Upper Gun Club, where many of the malnourished children are, the parents spend their time playing tong-its (gambling),” she said.
The fathers were usually construction workers or habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) drivers, who found nothing wrong with feeding their children the same rice and fish crackers they fed themselves regularly.
Enriquez said there was a feeding program for the malnourished that had been going on for a year, where at 2 p.m. at a different sitio every month, there was feeding for about 100 children for one month.
“Pero mag-atang na man lang ang parents. (But the parents now just rely on this for their children’s food). We gave them a livelihood program like rag making. We provided the materials. They only had to provide the labor. The materials are brought to them, and someone picks up the finished rags. But when we go there, they have not produced anything,” Enriquez said.
Seminars
The DSWS strengthens its nutrition interventions by encouraging the setup of backyard and community gardens to secure food for the families’ daily needs, and providing job facilitation and capital assistance for livelihood projects.
For behavior change, nutrition promotion is done through the conduct of regular Family Development Sessions, Parent Effectiveness Services seminars for parents in day care centers, and the Pabasa sa Nutrisyon.
Seville acknowledged that there are many more malnourished children out there, but said it is just too expensive for the City to feed them all.
Feeding also cannot be done in some areas, especially far-flung areas, due to transportation difficulties, she said.
“Sometimes, they are malnourished because there is just not enough food,” she said.
But in the case of mothers of severely underweight children, DSWD 7’s Supplemental Feeding Program focal person Melinda Cañares said, “Sometimes, it’s their assessment that twice a day feeding of their children is okay already.”
Train
Aside from the poor attitude of mothers, legislation is now threatening to defeat the aims of the feeding program.
Cañares said the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (Train) law, which came into effect this year, has increased the prices of basic commodities, making it more difficult to adequately fund the program.
“The initial feedback from the LGU implementers is that the budget given by the DSWD is no longer enough because the budget is still P15/child/day for 120 days, which is P11 for the viand and P4 for rice,” she said.
“In Central Visayas, the LGUs want it increased to P20-P25 per child. But when we proposed it to the national office, di man ma kaya (it’s too big for the office to afford),” Cañares said.
The Train law, which was passed to help fund the Duterte administration’s infrastructure projects and reduce inequality, raised the excise taxes on petroleum products, vehicles, cigarettes and sweetened beverages, but also lowered personal income taxes.
But the poor cannot enjoy this decrease in income taxes because without regular jobs, they had not been paying income taxes anyway. Instead, they have felt only the effects of the inflation that the increased excises taxes have brought.
The inflation rate hit 5.2 percent in June, the highest since October 2011.
Philippine Statistics Authority data show that regular milled rice in Cebu City now costs P40 a kilo, up from P37 a year ago. A kilo of lean pork is now P240 from P220, galunggong P130 from P120, stringbeans P40 from P35, calamansi P64 from P50, tomato P70 from P50, and refined sugar P66 from P52.
Last month, recognizing the “adverse effects” the Train law has had on workers, the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board 7 approved a P20 increase in the daily minimum wage in Metro Cebu, to take effect on Aug. 3.
While this is intended to help workers cope with the rising prices of goods, it is also seen to increase inflation further, as companies are expected to pass on the increase in labor cost to consumers.
For the entire province of Cebu, the DSWD 7 funded the feeding of 85,067 children in 1,643 day care centers and Supervised Neighborhood Play (SNP) in school year 2017-2018.
Livelihood
Asked if the DSWD automatically linked the parents of malnourished children to livelihood assistance to make food more available in the household, Cañares said there were only “initial agreements” now to make that link.
Also, the livelihood currently offered does not match their skills.
She cited poultry raising, swine dispersal and distribution of fingerlings.
“But they don’t know how to raise these animals, so the animals will end up getting slaughtered,” she said.
“We have reports from the Department of Public Works and Highways that they will hire workers for one to two months, but they have no skills in construction,” she added.
Despite the challenges, Cañares said the DSWD’s initiatives had helped reduce malnutrition, at least as the weight of children enrolled in day care show.
The DSWD’s feeding in day care and SNP started in 2011, she said.
In the first year of the feeding in the province of Cebu, 15.38 percent of the children were malnourished before the feeding started, falling to 4.46 percent at the end of the 120-day feeding.
By the second year, the baseline figure of the malnourished had slid to 11.76 percent, with just 3.51 percent still malnourished at the end of the feeding. By the program’s sixth year, the baseline figure had dropped further to 7.26 percent, with only 3.64 percent still malnourished at the end of the cycle.
With many DSWD programs already in place to help reduce poverty, Cañares said the gap was now more on identifying the malnourished children, down to the level of the barangay, and not only those attending day care.
“So we’re now having an inventory of all children 2-5 years old in barangays to find out how many are in day care, SNP, private school, or not attending any of these three, because those not attending are the potential children we will enroll in day care or SNP,” she said.
“With the better identification of the children 0-5 years old, we can now link the families of the malnourished children to livelihood, and at the same time, strengthen the Family Development Seminars on nutrition,” said DSWD 7 regional information officer Leah Quintana. (CTL)